Dune (50 page)

“Ah-h-h-h,” Stilgar said.

She thought at first it must be a patrol vehicle, then realized it was a mirage—another landscape hovering over the desert-sand and a distant wavering of greenery and in the middle distance a long worm traveling the surface with what looked like Fremen robes fluttering on its back.

The mirage faded.

“It would be better to ride,” Stilgar said, “but we cannot permit a maker into this basin. Thus, we must walk again tonight.”

Maker
—
theirword for worm,
she thought.

She measured the import of his words, the statement that they could not permit a worm into this basin. She knew what she had seen in the mirage—Fremen riding on the back of a giant worm. It took heavy control not to betray her shock at the implications.

“We must be getting back to the others,” Stilgar said. “Else my people may suspect I dally with you. Some already are jealous that my hands tasted your loveliness when we struggled last night in Tuono Basin.”

“That will be enough of that!” Jessica snapped.

“No offense,” Stilgar said, and his voice was mild. “Women among us are not taken against their will . . . and with you . . . .” He shrugged. “. . . even that convention isn't required.”

“You will keep in mind that I was a duke's lady,” she said, but her voice was calmer.

“As you wish,” he said. “It's time to seal off this opening, to permit relaxation of stillsuit discipline. My people need to rest in comfort this day. Their families will give them little rest on the morrow.”

Silence fell between them.

Jessica stared out into the sunlight. She had heard what she had heard in Stilgar's voice—the unspoken offer of more than his countenance. Did he need a wife? She realized she could step into that place with him. It would be one way to end conflict over tribal leadership—female properly aligned with male.

But what of Paul then? Who could tell yet what rules of parenthood prevailed here? And what of the unborn daughter she had carried these few weeks? What of a dead Duke's daughter? And she permitted herself to face fully the significance of this other child growing within her, to see her own motives in permitting the conception. She knew what it was—she had succumbed to that profound drive shared by all creatures who are faced with death—the drive to seek immortality through progeny. The fertility drive of the species had overpowered them.

Jessica glanced at Stilgar, saw that he was studying her, waiting.
A daughter born here to a woman wed to such a one as this man—what would be the fate of such a daughter?
she asked herself.
Would he try to limit the necessities that a Bene Gesserit must follow?

Stilgar cleared his throat and revealed then that he understood some of the questions in her mind. “What is important for a leader is that which makes him a leader. It is the needs of his people. If you teach me your powers, there may come a day when one of us must challenge the other. I would prefer some alternative.”

“There are several alternatives?” she asked.

“The Sayyadina,” he said. “Our Reverend Mother is old.”

Before she could probe this, he said: “I do not necessarily offer myself as mate. This is nothing personal, for you are beautiful and desirable. But should you become one of my women, that might lead some of my young men to believe that I'm too much concerned with pleasures of the flesh and not enough concerned with the tribe's needs. Even now they listen to us and watch us.”

A man who weighs his decisions, who thinks of consequences,
she thought.

“There are those among my young men who have reached the age of wild spirits,” he said. “They must be eased through this period. I must leave no great reasons around for them to challenge me. Because I would have to maim and kill among them. This is not the proper course for a leader if it can be avoided with honor. A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.”

His words, the depth of their awareness, the fact that he spoke as much to her as to those who secretly listened, forced her to reevaluate him.

He has stature,
she thought.
Where did he learn such inner balance?

“The law that demands our form of choosing a leader is a just law,” Stilgar said. “But it does not follow that justice is always the thing a people needs. What we truly need now is time to grow and prosper, to spread our force over more land.”

What is his ancestry?
she wondered.
Whence comes such breeding?
She said: “Stilgar, I underestimated you.”

“Such was my suspicion,” he said.

“Each of us apparently underestimated the other,” she said.

“I should like an end to this,” he said. “I should like friendship with you . . . and trust. I should like that respect for each other which grows in the breast without demand for the huddlings of sex.”

“I understand,” she said.

“Do you trust me?”

“I hear your sincerity.”

“Among us,” he said, “the Sayyadina, when they are not the formal leaders, hold a special place of honor. They teach. They maintain the strength of God here.” He touched his breast.

Now I must probe this Reverend Mother mystery,
she thought. And she said: “You spoke of your Reverend Mother . . . and I've heard words of legend and prophecy.”

“It is said that a Bene Gesserit and her offspring hold the key to our future,” he said.

“Do you believe I am that one.”

She watched his face, thinking:
The young reed dies so easily. Beginnings are times of such great peril.

“We do not know,” he said.

She nodded, thinking:
He's an honorable man. He wants a sign from me, but he'll not tip fate by telling me the sign.

Jessica turned her head, stared down into the basin at the golden shadows, the purple shadows, the vibrations of dust-mote air across the lip of their cave. Her mind was filled suddenly with feline prudence. She knew the cant of the Missionaria Protectiva, knew how to adapt the techniques of legend and fear and hope to her emergency needs, but she sensed wild changes here . . . as though someone had been in among these Fremen and capitalized on the Missionaria Protectiva's imprint.

Stilgar cleared his throat.

She sensed his impatience, knew that the day moved ahead and men waited to seal off this opening. This was a time for boldness on her part, and she realized what she needed: some dar al-hikman, some school of translation that would give her. . . .

“Adab,” she whispered.

Her mind felt as though it had rolled over within her. She recognized the sensation with a quickening of pulse. Nothing in all the Bene Gesserit training carried such a signal of recognition. It could be only the adab, the demanding memory that comes upon you of itself. She gave herself up to it, allowing the words to flow from her.

“Ibn qirtaiba,” she said,“as far as the spot where the dust ends.” She stretched out an arm from her robe, seeing Stilgar's eyes go wide. She heard a rustling of many robes in the background. “I see a . . . Fremen with the book of examples,” she intoned. “He reads to al-Lat, the sun whom he defied and subjugated. He reads to the Sadus of the Trial and this is what he reads:

A trembling passed through her. She dropped her arm.

Back to her from the inner cave's shadows came a whispered response of many voices: “Their works have been overturned.”

“The fire of God mount over thy heart,” she said. And she thought:
Now, it goes in the proper channel.

“The fire of God set alight,” came the response.

She nodded. “Thine enemies shall fall,” she said.

“Bi-la kaifa,” they answered.

In the sudden hush, Stilgar bowed to her. “Sayyadina,” he said. “If the Shai-hulud grant, then you may yet pass within to become a Reverend Mother.”

Pass within,
she thought.
An odd way of putting it. But the rest of it fitted into the cant well enough.
And she felt a cynical bitterness at what she had done.
Our Missionaria Protectiva seldom fails. A place was prepared for us in this wilderness. The prayer of the salat has carved out our hiding place. Now . . . I must play the part of Auliya, the Friend of God. . . Sayyadina to rogue peoples who've been so heavily imprinted with our Bene Gesserit soothsay they even call their chief priestesses Reverend Mothers.

Paul stood beside Chani in the shadows of the inner cave. He could still taste the morsel she had fed him—bird flesh and grain bound with spice honey and encased in a leaf. In tasting it he had realized he never before had eaten such a concentration of spice essence and there had been a moment of fear. He knew what this essence could do to him—the
spice change
that pushed his mind into prescient awareness.

“Bi-la kaifa,” Chani whispered.

He looked at her, seeing the awe with which the Fremen appeared to accept his mother's words. Only the man called Jamis seemed to stand aloof from the ceremony, holding himself apart with arms folded across his breast.

“Duy yakha hin mange,” Chani whispered. “Duy punra hin mange. I have two eyes. I have two feet.”

And she stared at Paul with a look of wonder.

Paul took a deep breath, trying to still the tempest within him. His mother's words had locked onto the working of the spice essence, and he had felt her voice rise and fall within him like the shadows of an open fire. Through it all, he had sensed the edge of cynicism in her—he knew her so well!—but nothing could stop this thing that had begun with a morsel of food.

He sensed it, the race consciousness that he could not escape. There was the sharpened clarity, the inflow of data, the cold precision of his awareness. He sank to the floor, sitting with his back against rock, giving himself up to it. Awareness flowed into that timeless stratum where he could view time, sensing the available paths, the winds of the future . . . the winds of the past: the one-eyed vision of the past, the one-eyed vision of the present and the one-eyed vision of the future—all combined in a trinocular vision that permitted him to see time-become-space.

There was danger, he felt, of overrunning himself, and he had to hold onto his awareness of the present, sensing the blurred deflection of experience, the flowing moment, the continual solidification of that-which-is into the perpetual-was.

In grasping the present, he felt for the first time the massive steadiness of time's movement everywhere complicated by shifting currents, waves, surges, and countersurges, like surf against rocky cliffs. It gave him a new understanding of his prescience, and he saw the source of blind time, the source of error in it, with an immediate sensation of fear.

The prescience, he realized, was an illumination that incorporated the limits of what it revealed—at once a source of accuracy and meaningful error. A kind of Heisenberg indeterminacy intervened: the expenditure of energy that revealed what he saw, changed what he saw.

And what he saw was a time nexus within this cave, a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action—the wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand—moved a gigantic lever across the known universe. He saw violence with the outcome subject to so many variables that his slightest movement created vast shiftings in the pattern.

The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too, was action with its consequences.

The countless consequences—lines fanned out from this cave, and along most of these consequence-lines he saw his own dead body with blood flowing from a gaping knife wound.

 

JESSICA AWAKENED in cave darkness, sensing the stir of Fremen around her, smelling the acrid stillsuit odor. Her inner timesense told her it would soon be night outside, but the cave remained in blackness, shielded from the desert by the plastic hoods that trapped their body moisture within this space.